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suckspace

My main agenda for this project was to explore compound curving surfaces as a method to structure a route and establish programmatic differences. It was by far, more complex geometrically than I typically design. Instead of the blob route, I tried to create a predominantly concave appearance- spaces collapsing inward but doing so not by eradicating convex surfaces but with a rhythm of concave and convex crossings similar to the time-lapse photographs of milk drops in D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form (a book referenced alot here).

It should be noted that the Air Tight project, as it was given to us, was a sales office that presented the plane by creating its own interior experience rather than physically masking or draping it. This is critical, because the easy trap of mimicking or accessorizing the plane seemed to take projects further away from the formagraphic idea Denari initially presented to us.
-aaron

6 Comments

I find this project to be a little bit more innovative and challenging than the other two...It seems as if you were still influenced by NMD, but unlike the others you were specifically able to manipulate the spatial potential of the forms, creating a situation where it started to reflect your own personal, innovative authorship.

A; I agree with the draping tendancies you mentioned. I wonder if where that came from? -if it was something universally exciting, driven by the seemingly strict programme, or something otherwise? You mentioned the formographic component of the programme. I think your project is much more internalized in an exploratory sense. The design methodology you challenged yourself with seems to have resulted in a building that is a manifestation of your own process. I am not sure it has the moments of overall programmatic communicative clarity that a nmda design presents. Yet, the exploration reveals new secrets on every visit. In this manner, the design is highly personalized as each person will find their own experiences. I guess I am saying it does not seem like you are explaining how the building performs, people are learning the language individually and each translation is unique. Can you discuss some of the performative aspects of your design? -Both, how it effected the design process, and now how you see it months after digestion has been completed.

Looking back, everyone struggled with the givens of the 737 and hangar (as noted by architechnophilia). It shows the difficulty we were having with Denari's favoring form more as a communicative device rather than a physical frame or packaging. Whether or not these projects look like a NMD project is unimportant to me. I think Denari has something with his formographic idea that it was important for us to enage through the project.

I find the importance of Neil's formogrpahic idea in the realization not just that forms communicate but these distanced translational readings are our primary connection to spaces we inhabit. The modernist tendency is to think of form as shaping shape. It's Mies van der Rohe's planes plucking rooms from the infinite expanse. Then pomostmodernism came along and everyone was thinking in terms of signifiers and meaning springing from two-dimensional facades. Unlike many that are returning to modernist devices, Neil seems to be sticking to the postmodernist approach but rooting it not in history but a less defined collective language of corporate logos, industrial designed products, and various 2d interface platforms. In regards to the performativity of an object, its functioning or ability to act upon other things is theninseperable from the information it holds.

As far as my project, I never really developed the interior environments so many of the devices are conceived from the outside knowing that a tube sets up a very specific interior condition while having an opposite effect on the outside. To boil it down, thats the basic premise- that a single surface carries with it the potential for inclusion and exclusion by the fact that its two-sided. There are some further layers of devices such as the top space that unfurls off the top of the adjacent tube and the back of the main theater that splits to accommodate the intersecting tubes. My methods are different than Neil who primarily uses 2d curves, so I didn't get the same hyperspecific path leading through.